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I always check Costco first for anything I want to buy. But if they don't have it, I find it really hard to research what's actually high quality. It's not always "you get what you pay for", because I've absolutely paid higher prices for stuff that turned out to be crap. :(

Costco isn’t perfect but the number of times we’ve been burned following my wife’s strategy of trusting Costco for this reason is like less than five, as opposed to all the times, everywhere else, for every conceivable item.

for a dollar? I'll buy three, use them for two years each, and throw them away when they break

I don't know for certain, but I'd expect Amazon has a significantly higher market share for most products than Costco

Costco is popular but limited. Amazon has a much broader footprint and reach.

They do deliver for a small fee. Might be worth at least looking into.

Too bad they're so far. I can't bike to them so they might as well be on the moon.

others that I think have done well in smaller silos are businesses like Dick’s Sporting Goods or Scheels, they have reliable and competitive athletic gear, and you don’t have to sweat some weird knock-off

I've always been joking that Amazon is merely American AliExpress

People are really missing that the outcome of this is people just buy the cheapest option.

of which versions were fake in the reviews. Exact same issue with Smooche Korean foundation. Then there are the ads on Youtube and in my games for things that cannot possibly exist and if they did would be society changing. Just scam after scam... its exhausting!

Every market is the Market for Lemons to some extent.

America’s Test Kitchen? I still think Reddit offers a lot of useful product knowledge if you know where to look for it but there’s definitely more marketing litter than there used to be.

I have definitely highlighted shoddy construction or even a safety issue when making the videos. For personal purchases, I have learned a neat trick: Sort videos by "recent". Brands usually get a bunch of fakes at once and then stop paying for them. Also, it helps to see if there's a recent defect

Thus would seem to fly in the face of your claim no? That people are desperate for stuff that doesn’t suck and often spend a lot of time and energy trying to get that stuff.

It’s excellent but doesn’t cover everything. A lot, but not everything. I always use it for big purchases and rarely buy the cheapest.

I was an Amazon reviewer for years, never received cash (in fact paid taxes on the items I reviewed). I tested everything thoroughly & wrote long, detailed reviews. Then 3rd party sellers realized it was easier to flood the zone with bots that wrote 5⭐ reviews like "good"

I'm a fan of the three star review. Five stars can give some good context/background. Occasionally one-star will give a genuine vibe for shite. But three star folks tend to be real. * also, if the low stars are all about packaging, the product is probably solid.

Not all markets are the same. Flights are expensive and consumable, it makes sense to save a lot -- though Spirit's failure shows there's a limit to that. I'd happily pay $25 for wool socks that last years, like they used to, but reviews say Smartwool and other brands have shittified (cont)

I got a card in a product ftom Amazon making this exact proposition & reported tye seller to Amazon. Their response was "c'mon buddy you don't like gift certificates?"

Do you not see how this is possibly inconsistent with it being the revealed preference that people just want cheap, poorly made goods?

NY Mag and NYT to triangulate on basically any purchase over $30 that I can't get at Costco

So do you plan to address how this directly contradicts your view at the start of the thread?

Amazon reviews are a source but look at the one star reviews first. And use other sources

I actually find 3- or 4-star reviews pretty useful. There's often discussion of flaws in the product, and whether it's worth the tradeoff.

I find that reddit is good at filtering out garbage, but reddit [product category]-enthusiasts seem to regularly hyperfocus on features that normies don't care about. I don't want a speedqueen topload washer will (/may) last ~forever... while causing 2x the wear to my clothes.

My partner says one of my greatest assets is my ability to research internet purchases.

i want to note as someone who lives in asia that i *regularly* get spam texts/messages trying to recruit me to review-bot on the regional shopping websites

Yep, a friend received random, quite expensive stuff from Amazon over a few months. presumably hoping for 5* reviews

This somewhat undermines the revealed preference case. Being hard to tell the junk apart from quality pushes price to be the determining factor.

See, this is a really important point. The cost of materials dropped like a stone but the cost of labor stayed the same, so it really is now cheaper -- even in the long term! -- to throw away stuff that gets worn instead of repairing it.

I have a pair of boots that can be, and have been resoled, but I'll be surprised if I can find a resoling facility next time it comes up. The people who run shoe resoling shops are generally senior citizens.

But as a consumer you don't know if a higher price also equals higher quality. You can spend much more money on shoes and they come out of the same factory than cheaper shows.

They've been made by NPS in Northamptonshire for years and their Solovair range is functionally identical and much cheaper, fyi.

How can someone say finding quality is not *possible*? What a weird and false thing to say.

Absolutely insane take to argue it’s not possible to buy good long lasting clothes. At this moment I’m wearing $35 pants that I bought 4 years ago and wear all the time and they’re fine. What is this obsessive need to insist the world is 100% horrible and there is no escape?

The same issue arises where a lot of fashion houses have their "diffusion" line, a la Armani Exchange or Canali Proposta

And you can consult an inflation calculator and see that the English doc martens cost twice as much as they did the 80s, accounting for inflation!!

You know where customers are getting consistently higher than inflation product improvements? Advertising.

When I was in the Lodge store, I was told by the staff that the Lodge products sold in Target and other big retailers are what are sold in the Lodge Store as factory seconds - still made by Lodge in the US, but not quite the quality that qualifies for the regular full Lodge price.

Yes, you can buy high quality denim, made on american machines that were sold to Japanese companies when private equity gutted their American owners. I think you should investigate these dynamics a bit further in general.

Yeah, boots and denim are extremely complex technologies akin to a silicon fab and that knowledge is now lost to humanity forever. There’s not a single person left on the planet who understands either boots or denim. It’s very sad.

Are you trying to pick up an alt baddie?

This. I'm amazed at the tone-deafness of not understanding that when the majority of the populace is poorer than they've ever been, why would any of us be buying more expensive boots?

Do they sell these at regular shoe stores? or do I have to know about this from digging online? because if it's the latter, that's a really wack thing to assume that people should do this

Survivorship bias The past was full of poorly made clothes too, they didn't get preserved. The issue is clothes worth buying now usually don't have a marketing budget and are rarely sold in retail stores. Honestly the state of retail is far worse than online right now

Even at Costco we're talking about a manufacturing cost that's gonna be ~15% of SRP. So take your clothes price, multiply by .15 then ask yourself how much quality one can squeeze in that.

Not really accurate at all. There's more poor ppl online now, there all. Been complaining about Docs getting shitty since 90s. Why I never owned any. bsky.app/profile/lips...

Onitsuka Tiger also sells higher quality, made in Japan shoes that showcase craftsmanship. Of course, their cheaper mass produced shoes are more popular.

This is pretty much how everything in the market works now, and you have to go surprisingly far up before the thing actually is what you'd describe as "good quality"!

For sure sometimes you have to pay for quality, but other times you have to pay for a "Limited Release" gimmick or a label sewn onto the lining and it can be hard to tell the one from the other.

This is a great illustration of the problem that the person you quoted has: you thought your superior knowledge of market conditions was enough to avoid degraded products, only to find that you actually needed to know about a third shoe brand that you can pay $60 extra for them to not fall apart

You can buy them right off of the Levi's website. You can also get their selvedge or premium line for a lot less ($70-$90) and both of those are excellent compared to the baseline Levis's.

But you just said we can't tell without hours of research!

“People must like poverty, because otherwise they would choose to be rich. The idea that there are external forces creating this scenario is just cope.”

posts *my most genuinely unpopular take* ...wELL thAt wAs uNPoPulAr 🥴

Terry Pratchett wrote the Vimes 'Boots' theory of economics literally decades ago, and morons like you are still waffling like anyone actually believes you

Of course it is, because you refused to follow the current trendy "it's all about corporate greed" scapegoating, rather than the truth, which is that customers demand cheap, which is also what has driven so much American manufacturing overseas.

It turns out that the Internet and e-commerce did away with all of the gatekeeping roles *except* for the ones where you decide who gets to speak for the people.

Any theory that takes blame and agency away from people with actual power will anger people, as it should.

You should probably just assume that it was the internet hate machine and not the fact that you haven’t thought this through very well Blame everyone but yourself, that’s the ticket

A lot of people desperately want to be absolved of any guilt around buying mountains of sweatshop clothing from SHEIN. If they can blame capitalism, then it's not their fault anymore. 🤷

this is because social media users prefer cheap, low-quality

because it's incorrect

I think there’s a conflation between quality in general, as an immediate experience, and quality as durability specifically. Not only is it the hardest to get reliable info on, but to be someone who won’t pay more for a durable product is seen as personally shameful. Airline comfort ≠ sturdy boots.

I strongly agree but there is no reason for me to reply at you to yell at you. Hold the line!

It’s almost like you do this intentionally

People really hate being shown their own revealed preference 😬

I trade quality for price all the time. I don’t buy high end sunglasses because even though they’re better made and have better optics, I don’t think they’re worth the money because I break or lose them on a regular basis. Instead I spend like $5 a pair straight from the factory.

I agree with you

Are they less popular due to more limited availability? Or is this just Sam Vimes 'Boots' Theory of Socio-Economic Unfairness in action?

You can get good (not the Japanese stuff) 501s for about $90. I have seven pair. I love them! So much better than the base, cheap versions. That's not even mentioning all the niche brands. You can just go to the Levi's website and order them with free shipping.

Mainline Docs have never had a steel shank.

Hard to take serious the socio-economical takes of someone who falls for marketing like this.

Amen!

Honestly even the vintage designs were never good. The design of the sole was always a gimmick, just buy real boots if you're spending that much.

Agreed. There are a number of bake-offs, but I like this one. https://youtu.be/GynkH-6IHrc?is=nkH2HsXRbpExNcvz

Yes, solovairs are great! I love mine

yep bought 2 pairs of Solovair 8 years ago, still wearing them

Damn I should cop a pair of Solovairs, they’re slick

Although I will say the Derby Boot was always kinda garbage

Price is a number but quality is nearly unquantifiable. If you know little or nothing about a product or industry, and most consumers do especially online when you can’t even hold it, it just makes sense to buy cheapest. Because too often things are expensive crap.

I honestly just don't trust a lot of semi-consumable stuff like clothes and shoes to last long enough to justify the premium price.

You can’t trust Reddit any more. There are plenty of bots & shills. There are even companies that explicitly offer this as a service

This completely contradicts your original point!

ButIt is not hard to found which stuff is genuine shitty quality and buy those. It’s like everything in Temu.

Quitting Amazon and Target in 2025 was the best thing I've done to reduce my consumption in general and crap specifically. I still buy things but I'm way more intentional about it.

I wonder how much of it is that the retailer’s liability for marketplace sales were, until very recently, non existent compared to brick and mortar stores. Even now, it seems like Amazon’s requirement is limited to removing the seller